No Ice at the Fish Market: A Fillet of Fiction in the Southern Gothic Style with Alternating Narrators

An epic parody of America’s gothic nightmares and peculiar literature, No Ice at the Fish Market exorcises Edgar Allan Poe’s macabre ghost, the godfather of our homegrown gothic. It confronts not only low-brow thrillers suitable for reading on a beach, but also high-brow “masterpieces” taught by academics to unwitting students. It explores with ribald reverence and a Southern accent, such incessant themes as death, hypocrisy, and sexual perversity in pages packed with murders and a coffin packed with porn. In wrestling for America’s spirit, No Ice works its exorcism through the showdown of a pair of lovers, one “Poe-sessed” and one redemptive. Eddie Ambler is convinced of being a Poe incarnate. Drunk like Poe, he breaks into Poe’s historic bedroom at the University of Virginia to recuperate from binging and forget his problems. Marsha Beauregard, his editor and former fiancée, has had enough of Eddie posing as the ghost of Poe. She struggles to redeem him in repeated, passionate, and witty clashes. Eddie writes about a galaxy of gothic characters and his private nightmares. Told in two parts, one a put-down of a Southern town and one the town’s attempt to murder Eddie in revenge, No Ice reveals the truth and trauma of our literary heritage. The story starts and ends among the charred reminders of an antebellum mansion crowned by weeds and browsed by goats. The book’s appraisal and transcendence of our gothic legacy are strengthened by its style, relying on poetic imagery and hypnotic rhythms.